Michael Lally: How Creativity Can Save Lives

From Mike: “I’ve been saying since I was young that ‘poetry saved my life’ and it continues to. Both reading the poetry of others and hearing them read it, but even more crucially, writing my own. Though, in fact, all kinds of creative activity on my part, and as demonstrated by the work of others, have also saved and continue to save my life. I created a post card poetry reading announcement many decades ago that stated ‘Poetry conquers fear’ and that too holds true for me and always has. It’s fear that is at the root of my problems with life and wanting to give up, many times throughout my seventy-three years. But by creatively expressing my response to whatever challenges I am, or my world or the world is, facing at any given moment, even if it’s full of rage or ranting, I can begin to put the challenge into a perspective that includes some knowledge of not just the history of mine and the world’s tragic moments but the history of all kinds of creative responses to those tragedies and I begin to see a way out of my despair and deep disappointment. There was an Argentine working-man philosopher named Antonio Prochia who wrote aphorisms, and one of them, loosely translated, was: ‘The person who has made nothing and the person who has made a thousand things both feel the same desire: to make something.’”

Lally has had over two dozen books published since 1970, has won National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, awards, has held various day jobs including book critic, TV and movie actor, screenwriter and script doctor etc. Since 2006 he has been writing the blog, Lally’s Alley, lallysalley.blogspot.com